Holistic design is not only about objects but about the social conditions for shared learning. Living, breathing spaces have the power to invite connection, trust, openness, and creativity, and in turn to strengthen community and support environmental stewardship. Eco-somatic workshops, community place-making, and artistic collaborations are some of the places to explore what this can look like: welcoming environments where people feel safe to learn, heal, and explore together. What's needed are socio-environmental models that support compassionate, playful ways of organizing, and that nourish our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual sides. My own practice is an ongoing inquiry into what this can look like.
FIELD GUIDING
2024–2025 · White Mountains, Maine and New Hampshire
Working as a field guide at a therapeutic wilderness program in the mountains of western Maine. Leading multi-day backcountry expeditions with adolescents that offer challenge and adventure in the wilderness and build self-sufficiency. Growing with students in the tradition of outdoor and experiential learning, we learn to use our senses to discover and experiment, solve problems, and appreciate the simplicity and discomfort that nature provides. It is essential education for learning presence, trust, and the rhythms of a place, carried out in terrain instead of a studio.
WESTBROOK WORLD MARKETS
Helping immigrant-owned shops be seen in their own downtown
2024–25 · Westbrook, Maine · with Amy Grommes Pulaski and Stella Hernandez · with Discover Downtown Westbrook and the Immigrant Welcome Center
Five New Mainer-owned markets in downtown Westbrook offered Sudanese, Rwandan, Congolese, Caribbean, Eastern European, and Arabic products, but many residents didn’t know they were there, and the shops faced steady competition from chain supermarkets.
Rather than marketing for the owners, we worked directly alongside them, starting from their own ideas and bringing in a social media marketer and graphic designers. Each shop got a new logo the owner helped design and a new sign out front, so the shops could finally be seen from the street. Owners received Facebook accounts, IT training, help with posts, and Google landing pages. We brought their products to our vendor gatherings on Westbrook Commons, featured them in a holiday gift guide, highlighted them on Instagram and Facebook, and made short videos introducing each owner to the community.
In 2025, the project was named Project of the Year by the Maine Development Foundation.
“I feel the community support. Working with them helped me a lot.”, Solange
“The people here are very nice, so I love to do business here. The World Market helped me get exposed to more people and more businesses.”, Joli
Community, Place, Art asks us to do some creative imagining as we search for meaning throughout our local lives, and to share the beauty, joy, and solidarity of being together.
VALLEE SQUARE STREET PAINTING
2024 · Westbrook, Maine
A community street-painting project transforming the pavement into a mural where summer concerts are held. The painted musical score of the spiritual "Wade in the Water" weaves together the Presumpscot River and Westbrook's Underground Railroad history. Designed by a local artist, the community came together to help paint it.
VERKLIGHETEN (THE REALITY)
Spring 2022 · Bjuv, Sweden
A collaborative art exhibition and workshop series in a public art space in Bjuv municipality. Working across multiple drawing techniques chosen to be inclusive and to connect us to a sense of place, we held workshops and exhibited continuously over several weeks, the art generated along the way steadily activating the space.
RELATIVELY SAFE ANIMALSAn experiment in carrying somatic awareness into everyday life
Winter 2022 · Joensuu, Finland · with fellow dancers from the Dance and Somatics program at ISLO (Eastern Finland Sports Institute)
After months immersed in movement and improvisation in the studio, working closely and physically together and attending to every small sensation, we began to feel a bit like animals: alert, sensitive, less inhibited, more primal. The name grew from that feeling. The project was an experiment: what happens when this heightened bodily awareness leaves the studio and enters everyday spaces and times?
We took our walking exercises and our meditative, physical awareness practices out into the streets: cycling, walking, sitting, standing. We also asked a second question: can the intimacy of this experience be captured at all? We set up an Instagram account as a kind of sketchbook for small artistic experiments, testing how photos and short posts might hold something as fleeting as a body’s attention to its surroundings.
What shifted was mostly in us. We came to treasure the small details and passing moments, and to become deeply present to the here and now. The ordinary became the material of practice.
Some experiments: @relativelysafeanimals
SOMATIC METHODS WORKSHOPS
Teaching designers to start from first-hand experience
2013–2019 · University of Gothenburg (HDK), Konstfack (Stockholm), and IT University of Copenhagen · for design, service design, and art students
Every designer, whatever they make, is ultimately designing an experience. Before designers solve problems, they make worlds: they decide what to notice, how to frame it, and what might be possible. These workshops trained that capacity from the body outward.
I designed a series of somatic, embodied exercises in which students play with attention, time, and space. Most are structured in pairs or other small constellations. One person moves with eyes closed while the other guides them, showing them the world through touch, or simply stays nearby as a silent witness to keep them safe while they explore. Working without sight draws attention away from visual chatter and opens up other ways of “gathering data”: touch, sound, smell, taste. Drawing on Body-Mind Centering, the exercises treat perception as an active, experiential process rather than passive reception. They also introduce the quieter, receptive side of design: yielding, relaxing, taking experience in, not only acting on it. After each exercise, students reflect and record what they noticed through drawing, poetry, and discussion.
Toward the end, students design an experience for one another, a way of encountering a space or a material. They often surprised us: snow, water, scents, food, a string to follow, unexpected textures underfoot. The shift was in how they approached design itself: no longer standing outside a situation to study it, but immersing themselves in it to understand it from within. Several went on to build their master’s theses around these methods, one camped out as a form of research, others moved deeper into movement practice.
“It was a bit of a shock that I was hesitant when it came to using [my body and senses] intuitively.” Rae
“I let go of my doubts and just went with it without questioning, and I actually believe that was also one of the most valuable things for me.” Petra
“I need to relax more in order to be more aware of how my mind flows from a stressed stage to a creative one.” Laura
THE PEOPLE’S SUPERMARKET
2014 · London, UK with Andrew Whitcomb and Lynn Cooper
A co-design project with The People's Supermarket, a small cooperative grocery in Holborn, London, facing uncertainty around its purpose and organizational direction as a multicultural, inclusive social enterprise. We worked with the supermarket to investigate its challenges, build collaborative partnerships, and explore new possibilities for its programs, outreach, and marketing.
WEAR ONE ANOTHER
2014 · Gothenburg, Sweden (with Sam Hookway)
Wearable intervention at a TED-X convention as a playful provocation into social conventions, exploring physical proximity and conversation. Volunteers wear t-shirts sewn together in different two-person configurations (side-to-side and back-to-back / front-to-back) for a duration of time.
FUTURE IN MOTION
Summer 2014 · Borås, Sweden with Hector Garcia-Jorquera and Imelda Cruz Linde
Artistic collaboration using movement as a socio-spatial intervention, bringing embodied, improvised methods into public spaces. Examining the shifting dynamics between passersby and place and considering non-political approaches to community and exchange.
CRAFTING PLAY:CES
2013 · EAD Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden (with Helena Hansson)
A workshop scaling up weaving as a collaborative, hands-on learning platform in an outdoor public space. Willow branches serve as an open-ended material, left open to whatever participants would make, encouraging an improvised, playful space for for kids and adults to enter and exit.
KVIBERG CO-MAKER SPACE Designing shared ownership into two empty civic buildings
2012–13 · Gothenburg, Sweden · with Stefan Molnar and Ida Rosell · for the City of Gothenburg’s cultural department
Two city-owned villas in Kviberg stood empty. The city’s cultural department wanted to know whether they could become a living cultural space: not one run from the top down, but one shaped by the people who would use it.
Rather than designing the space for the community, we designed the conditions for the community to make it their own. Drawing on examples of self-organized, community-run spaces, we held a series of design gatherings with local creatives and interested actors, deliberately seeking a mix of people that reflected the diversity of Kviberg. Together we explored what the villas could become and how they might be run collectively.
Building on this process, the city opened the villas to bids from local artists and groups, each proposing a business model for running the space together. The winning bid came from 415, a group of young artists, who turned the villas into Kompani 415: a creative co-working space that hosts music events, workshops, theater, and yoga, with a coffee shop at its heart. More than a decade later, it is still running.
